ABSTRACT

“You are fortunate that you have a place,” my friend remarked to me. She was referring to the fact that my family and I had a place – more than a burial plot per se – to bury the ashes of our son who had been killed in a freak flying accident in East Africa. The place is a small island off the northeast coast of the United States where our family has spent at least a part of every summer for more than four decades; the burial plot lies close to a white wooden fence in the northwest quadrant of the small cemetery that was established by the original islanders, fishing and farming people, in the late eighteenth century. Occupying the brow of a hill overlooking the sea, the cemetery is a favorite spot of the island’s summer community of about 50 people; it is a place of broad vistas, both spatial and temporal.